considering upgrading...

[GoldBaron]

I have an old Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard and a northwood P4 3.06 GHz 533mHz FSB processor. I was thinking of upgrading to get games like Half Life 2 to run better, but I'm sort of walled in. I have a GeForce 4 ti4200, but the board is AGP 4X, so I thought about swapping motherboards to get an AGP 8X slot and faster memory... But would it be worth it? Will the processor just run pc3200 ram at pc2700?

 

[endyen]

Your problem is that the 4200 is no longer supported by new detonators. The easiest thing to do, would be to drop a 6600gt in there. Sure, it works on 8X slots, but it works just as well on 4X agp. There is no use for the kind of band width that 8X offers.
Since your chip works at 133 fsb, using pc3200 at full speed will not give any benefit. Running ram asyncronously has it's own costs.

 

[fishmahn]

Yah, your slowdown isn't the CPU, it's the 4200. The performance difference between AGP8x and AGP4x is approx 0%, so you can get a better GPU (6600GT is a good one - not too expensive, but powerful enough for today's games) and not cripple it.

Mike.

<font color=blue>Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside the dog its too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx</font color=blue>

 

[Crashman]

Your biggest problems are 1.) Slow graphics card 2.) single-channel motherboard. AGP 8x isn't a factor. And a faster processor would only help a little, so it's not worth the money.

I'd settle for a faster AGP card.

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[GoldBaron]

Thanks for the advice. For now I put in another 512 mb of memory, a quieter cpu fan/heatsink, and a bigger, quieter power supply... Made my computer more dorm friendly, and the power supply is big enough to handle a new video card.. I was looking at the 6600GT from eVGA, but that's for another forum.